


Shangri-La

by nimmieamee



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pre-Serum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-04
Updated: 2015-03-04
Packaged: 2018-03-16 08:14:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3480884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve gets money, still won't move in with Bucky, and somehow totally misses that Queer Brooklyn is an option.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shangri-La

In September of 1941, Steve received twenty-three dollars for a mural on beautiful Cortelyou Road. Ten of those dollars went to buying himself a suit that would suit Cortelyou Road: the matrons of the area wouldn’t accept a little man in shirtsleeves with a dirty collar. When the job was done he was marginally wealthy, beautifully be-suited, with his fingers not quite scrubbed of paint but his hair bright and gleaming, almost metallic in the sunlight.

He seemed to Bucky the personification of the last vestiges of summer. Small Steve, rising in the world, everything about him promising.

“It’s a good week, huh?” Bucky asked him, when Steve came by his job. Bucky repaired cooling systems for a friend of his father’s on Atlantic Avenue. It was new and exciting work, and paid good money, but meant he sweated in shirtsleeves all day, even through the icy cold pockets of the store. A life less financially precarious than Steve’s, more prestigious, highly technical, something Bucky could even brag about, since people imagined he was a kind of automotive genius. They didn’t know he was just some chump surrounded day-in and day-out by tanks and car parts and cabinets full of freezing fluid. Truthfully, his job bored him. He didn’t get to meet many people. He never went down to Cortelyou Road these days.

Steve was buried in the paper. Bucky’s bosses didn’t mind him around. Bucky had talked to them until they were convinced that Steve, though a known troublemaker, had deep respect for cooling systems. Steve had marginal respect for cooling systems. He was sitting on a valuable tank. Bucky figured that was fine; Steve didn’t weigh much anyway.

“It’s a good week for you, huh?” Bucky tried again.

Steve turned the page. His hair still gleamed and his coat was still new, but his mouth was a tight line. He said, “It isn’t right,” more to himself than to Bucky.

“What isn’t right?” Bucky said.

“This,” Steve said, breathing in hard. He traced something on the page like he was rubbing it out instead. “The stars.”

“And stripes?” Bucky tried.

“No,” Steve said. “Just stars. Put on ‘em at age six now. The yellow stars.”

In October, Steve was doing a cover for a magazine of the Brooklyn Lodge. The pay was nearly as good as the Cortelyou Road job. He paid his landlords, invested in more brushes and inks and things, bought sensible foods that he could store without attracting rodents, and restocked his toiletries, so that when the bottles he was carefully apportioning out every day ran out, he’d have more there to use. He came to Atlantic Avenue smelling like their childhood, like oatmeal and the serviceable cheap floral soap Sarah Rogers had taught him to buy: poor but clean. It was the wonderful smell of breezy days just before the weather became too hot, a very out of place smell for October. But Bucky didn’t mind. He was handling some small, tricky mechanical parts when Steve came in, but it didn’t stop him from saying, over his shoulder, “Wow, you’ve cleaned up. Good day ahead of you?”

Behind Bucky, Steve sat down. He’d been reading the paper as he walked in – dumb. He might’ve walked into a tank or something. Now he turned the page. He said in a low voice, more to himself than to Bucky, “Thirty three _thousand_ … “

And then his voice was swallowed up by the cold room and the whirring car parts all around.

Bucky stared at him. No more details seemed forthcoming. Bucky said, “Wanna clue me in?”

Steve turned his face up. It was white and narrow. He’d been transported somewhere, some hidden turbulence inside him had flung him very far away. He held the paper up in front of him like a shield.

“Dead,” Steve said. “Last month. In a single night.”

“Ah,” said Bucky.

Steve was by now all about the draft. A peacetime draft. Steve had been denied the chance to enlist once already, but he said a man down at the recruiting office had told him it might be different once they really needed men. And anyway papers sometimes got lost, medical records sometimes didn’t make it in transit. So he awaited his calling-up with his mouth stretched thin, his skinny knuckles fervently turning the pages of the paper. Bucky’s pop had said he’d probably been exempt to begin with, and Steve hadn’t liked hearing that. Bucky hadn’t minded the thought. Some people said no one but a nut would want to be drafted, and Steve might be a nut, but he was also _Steve_ , that skinny, nice-smelling shoulder under his hands in the summer.

“Kind of a killjoy these days, though, ain’t he?” Bucky’s pop had said.

In November, the killjoy was asked to sketch huge winter patterns for a window display on Fulton Street. The best job of his life. Seventy-five dollars, he reported, when Bucky asked about it. A third upfront. This made Steve a man of means. He bought sturdy shoes so the coming winter wouldn’t freeze his feet – Steve with ice on his toes eventually meant Steve with fluid in his lungs; this was just the way things worked for Steve – and decent gloves, and a good stiff hat, and he got some thread to repair the tear in the warm blue sweater Bucky’s mother had made for him years ago. Bucky had selected the color and overseen all the work and set out all the specifications; now that he was a grown man and working under some of the greatest micro-managers in all of downtown Brooklyn, he could see that he’d been something of a tyrant. But the results had been well worth it. Steve came by Atlantic Avenue with ink in his hair, but his shoes as polished as church silver, with stiff warm hands, and his eyes that deeper blue they always had when he put the sweater on, so that when Bucky looked at him he could hear the conductor on the B train announcing the last stop for Coney Island.

“Did you hear? This guy Howard Stark’s planning to take over the old World’s Fair grounds,” Bucky said. “Gonna do his own fair, like they’re extending it. New exhibits. That’s good, I say. By last year, I was getting kind of sick of Electro the smoking robot. You saw him, right?”

Bucky had taken numerous girls out to Queens to see the sights. Steve hadn’t come along. He’d mostly been working. It seemed to Bucky now that this was wrong, all wrong. Girls were delightful; lilac smells and burnished autumn hair. But Steve was the chief companion of his best days, his warm beach days, and he now felt he’d missed out on something by never taking Steve along.

“Didn’t get the chance,” Steve muttered. He hadn’t taken off his coat, because it was cold in the store. Now he’d wedged himself between two hot whirring tanks. His shoes reflected the metal around, and his hair did, and his face was lit like polished steel.

Well, it didn’t matter, Bucky reflected. Now the fair had been reintroduced, reopening in time. It was like having a year with two Julys. That was good. That was great. He could take Steve to the next fair. That one would be even better than the last one, probably.

Bucky said, “It’ll be a good thing to do, won’t it? You can save up some of that cash burning a hole in your pocket.”

Steve pulled off a glove, licked his finger, and turned the page. He did not seem to have heard. He said to himself, “I… How can—I mean—“

“What is it?” Bucky said, half-dreading the answer.

Steve’s chin shot up. He turned the paper around so Bucky could see, jammed his finger along the relevant headlines, seemed anxious to point out every last detail, in fits and starts, like he was another jammed up machine that couldn’t run quite right.

“Plague fleas,” he told Bucky, low and furious, “And—and poison gases, and—“

“You know?” Bucky said, moving over to him and gently putting the paper down, guiding Steve’s hands to his sides, grinning in a forced warm way. “I think I read that one already.”

Steve was exempt from the draft. He got the news that month. He was prepared to march down to the recruiting office to rectify the situation, no matter what he’d been told the first time. Bucky held him back, convinced him the results might be different once they entered the war. He knew they wouldn’t be different, but he told his mother that it was all he could do to keep Steve from running off like a hothead. He had fantastic and unlikely visions of Steve running away to Canada and enlisting there and ending up prisoner somewhere, in some European prison in a field of yellow stars. Steve one of thirty three thousand faceless dead, vanishing into nothing. Steve getting on a boat and pretending to be somebody else and then ending up half a world away in a bombed out paper house, his lungs seizing up from poison gas, his flesh eaten away by plague fleas, his face green underneath his summer hair.

But Steve didn’t go anywhere. He saved up his cash. He saved it up so that he could spend the early days of December drawing up cartoons, free of charge, for various publications of the Anti-Fascist League. The League had also used Steve once or twice to slip into meetings of Coughlin’s Antiwar Christian Front, endeavors that ended with Steve’s eyes blacked and Bucky properly furious. But nothing he said could make Steve give up on helping the League; the League would have his assistance when no one else would. He made a good ally for the dark-eyed, college-educated young men who staffed the League’s Brooklyn office, and for their eyes on the ground, guys like Arnie Roth and Joe Goldstein. Having Steve in your corner—it didn’t look like much. But it counted for a lot, and really smart people could spot that right away, Bucky thought.

So Steve locked himself up in his room to work for them, for nothing, and didn’t come to see Bucky at all, and no one at his boarding house could confirm that he’d been outside and breathed fresh air in days, or even that he’d stepped out to the communal bathroom.

Steve no longer lived at the old apartment. He said there hadn’t been any point. His mother was dead, and he didn’t need a place with a separate bedroom, much less one that was only affordable with her salary and widow’s pension. The old boarding house down the street, he told Bucky. That was good enough for just him. But Bucky couldn’t figure out why Steve hadn’t come down past Fulton, closer to where the Barnes family lived. There were decent walkups on Nevins Street. They could have rented a place together. But Steve hadn’t seen the reason in putting Bucky out, relocating him from the old Barnes homestead on Bond. So Bucky had to go through the trouble, just about every day, of making his way over to the rough area near the Manhattan bridge, picking his way up the sagging boarding house steps, passing the communal room with its haze of smoke and sweat and loud laughter, stepping up the narrow back stairs, and then finally making it to Steve’s landing, where the paint peeled and a skinny window gave a terrific view of three trash cans and a brick wall.

He pounded on the door. No response. He reached up a hand and pounded on the transom, producing a loud rattling Steve couldn’t ignore.

“Just a minute,” came Steve’s voice.

And then, regular as clockwork, three or four minutes passed.

“Steve,” Bucky said through the door.

Several objects were hastily rustled, slammed, and dropped. A key turned. Steve appeared. His collar was dirty. His hair was a pale winter brown. His skin was somewhat yellowed in the weak hall light, like he’d been sitting in old newspapers for days and had picked up the trick of ageing like paper. Bucky peered around him to get a look at the room. The bed had been shoved at the wall and the chair tossed on top of it. Papers and inks and paints covered the floor. There was a half-eaten plate of boiled fish and beans by the cast-iron radiator. Steve had spread the greasy newspapers the fish came wrapped in on his dresser. The sinking of the HMS _Ark Royal_. Rumored 9000 Jews dead in Slonim. Germans killing as far out as Australia, sinking some cruiser – the _Sydney_ ; no survivors.

“You look crazy,” Bucky said bluntly. “Did you take a bath yet?”

“I have to have these down at the League office by four-thirty,” Steve said.

“They’re still not paying you?” Bucky said, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s a good cause,” Steve protested, “That nobody else is fighting for half as hard. If you’re not gonna be supportive, you can get out of here.”

“Oh, I’m gonna support you,” Bucky said. “To the bathtub, Steve.”

Steve lifted an arm and sniffed at himself. He didn’t actually smell that bad, not enough to make a dent in the cheap aftershave and sweat odor clinging to every corner of his boarding house. But he _looked_ like he hadn’t taken care of himself at all. That was the real worry.

“I smell fine, you creep,” he told Bucky accusingly. Then that old steel Steve determination came over him and he glanced down at all his work spread on the floor, saying, “Now I’ve gotta get back to work, so—“

Bucky gave up. Sort of. He pushed his way inside, stuck his hat on a corner of the dresser, shoved his coat in the corner, toed the door closed, and then sat on the one free edge of floor.

“Alright, what are we working with?”

They’d done this before. Bucky had no art inside him to speak of. That was alright. He could take brushes down to the bathroom to clean them. He could find clean paper. If called on, he could pen captions in a neater hand than Steve, so that people down at the printers’ could read them. He could read instructions aloud as Steve worked. And he could always offer input.

It wasn’t stuff Steve needed him for. He was just an extension of Steve for the next hour; that was all. But it made the work go more quickly.

Bucky caught glimpses of it as Steve toiled. Goebbels was a monkey on Hitler’s back, Axis soldiers a pastiche of skulls and metal, robotic parts from the store recycled as bones and tendons, holding axes and guns. The world was laid out in a bloody map with arrows showing the flow of mechanical trade. America was at the center. From there, deadly implements representing Wall Street deals went to Germany, German blitz boots painted a lively arrow across to Japan, an overflowing box of scrap metal had arrows taking it to every corner of the fight. It was labeled, ‘the Sixth Avenue El,’ which had been dismantled two years ago, its parts sent to dealers in the export business, who in turn sent it wherever it was wanted. German, Italy, Japan, who knew?

Steve called this one: “Not Our _Business?_ Until America Wakes Up, It’s Business As Usual.”

Bucky was beginning to understand why he looked so yellowed and worn.

“I’ll take these down to the office for you,” Bucky said. “Dekalb, by the bend, near the bank, yeah?”

“It’s fine,” Steve said. “I can take them.”

“I’ll get there faster,” Bucky said. “And you should get away from this stuff for a while.”

Steve glanced at him disapprovingly through his lashes, a better and more contemptuous hairy eyeball than even his mother had ever dished out.

“You look crazy,” Bucky said again, this time slowly and very clearly. “The League’s not gonna leave you behind if I take these down there instead of you. You need to clean up. Wash your face. Get a new shirt on.”

“Why? I’m not doing anything else today,” Steve complained.

“Sure you are,” Bucky said. “It’s December.”

Steve stared at him, perplexed. December was just December to Steve. A month as good as any other. A little colder, requiring a little more preparation so he wouldn’t get sick. But then Steve got sick in summer, too, so he’d never held it against December personally.

Steve had never had December like Bucky had December. Barnes family Decembers were a return to the best of the summer months, only better, because they came with tinsel, and the warmth was set just right, and the presents, though lacking in recent years, were always received with great joy. It was one last burst of comfort before horrible winter settled in and Bucky spent months freezing his fingers off and then also his toes as he trouped around looking for Steve.

Steve never looked for him, not really.

Steve was unreliable. He was present one minute, laughing on the way to Coney Island. And then he was gone. As a kid, it had been illness that had taken him away, sequestered him in hospital wards for weeks. Now it was poison gas, plague fleas, the Anti-fascists, business as usual, stars. But it was all the same: it was all Steve’s tendency to vanish, to send a message from Gerritsen Bay three days later: Buck, I told Arnie I would help him find a place for these people — they’re refugees. They needed somebody to go poking around a house, you know, like I was gonna buy it, because the landlords would sell if they thought it was Irish buying. 

Anyway. I need a ride back.

Reappearing only when Bucky went out to get him. Sometimes with more than one black eye.

In Bucky’s mind there had always been a kind of ticking clock, an uncomfortable pinprick Steve aroused. Steve – the skinny frame under his left arm, as much a part of Bucky as the arm itself was – wouldn’t be with him forever. His mother had told him this once, very plainly.

Darling, Steve isn’t strong. 

But no — no, that wasn’t it. Steve was strong enough. He was just no sure thing; he never had been. Bucky searched him out, looked after him, stuck by him — Bucky was the guarantor of their future. But Steve? Something was always pulling him away.

Now Steve said, “Oh, Christmas,” after a minute, like he could forget a day that came around every single year.

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “You’ve gotta get me something.”

Steve snorted.

“Fine,” Bucky said. “Then get something for yourself. You need it more.”

He looked around at the room. Steve had a wardrobe, a dresser, a rack for drying clothes, an old stove, a radiator, and not much else. His pop had come by here one day when Bucky couldn’t make it. He’d worried over Steve’s health on Bucky’s behalf – Bucky’s pop was solid like that – and then come home and, just between the two of them, reported that Steve’s room was a space fit for a suicide.

But Bucky didn’t think Steve would ever leave him that way. Steve wasn’t the type.

“I’ve got time to get you something,” Steve said, “And I don’t need anything for myself.”

“Well, I’m going down to look at your window display _today_ , so you may as well come with me,” Bucky said. “You’ve been working on these things for almost a week. Time to go have fun.”

Steve scowled, but gave in. Bucky scooped up the finished pieces, gave Steve orders to clean himself up, and stepped out to deliver the cartoons to the League.

"I’m coming back," Bucky told Steve.

"I know," Steve said, like Bucky didn’t need to tell him that.

Bucky didn’t need to tell him so. He never said stuff like that for Steve. He said it for himself. Steve was always disappearing places, and there was no guarantee that he’d be back if Bucky didn’t look out for him.

Bucky wasn’t like that. If Bucky were to believe that Steve didn’t much care about him, it would be beside the point. Steve — Steve was in his head already. Not Steve the way Steve was, contrary and irritable and terrifying, with that vanishing habit he had. Steve ut in the sun with his blue sweater, his voice firm like the crack of the first hit at Ebbets Field when the weather got warm. Steve might leave at any moment; Steve was a nut.

It didn’t matter. Bucky liked being with him, with his own skinny summer killjoy.

-

When Bucky left, Steve took another self-conscious sniff and decided that he smelled mostly like ink.

But a bath couldn’t hurt.

No one was in the bathroom. That was good. Steve wasn’t ashamed of his body – it was his and that was that – but there was something to be said for privacy. He got less comments that way. New guys sometimes thought it was a hoot to point out that he was small, like he didn’t already know. And he didn’t have to fight down the strange burn when Bruno Peretti came in to shave, in nothing but an undershirt, or Charley Flagg sauntered inside and said, “Hey, Rogers,” and sat on the can in his shorts to read the funnies. They had liberal rules in the boarding house. No one much cared if you looked. But bodily reactions were something else, and if Steve hadn’t reacted the same way every time Hazel Dreyer at the corner store looked down through long lashes at him as she rang him up, he would have been a little worried.

Steve sat in the water and soaped along his arms, his skinny chest, the bend of his ribs, his navel, his hips, his penis. Bucky came to mind, sitting on the cold floor, looking over Steve’s drawings, not noticing Steve was looking at him. Not caring that he was getting ink all over his careful hands, not minding if Steve’s paints marred his neat navy slacks. And Bucky always minded that sort of thing. He could get finicky as a cat about his appearance.

Steve felt a kind of urgency in him. He moved down to his legs to avoid touching there, where the urgency was, like it was some sort of sick spot, the site of an internal contamination. He knew it wasn’t. Plenty of people, men and women both, felt that way when they looked at Bucky. Steve could tell. There was a livingness to Bucky. When he walked into a room, suddenly other people seemed muted. They became ordinary, pliable as some of the parts Bucky handled every day. Steve was not by any means _pliable_. But there could be no doubt that he was ordinary by comparison, and, more than that, he was Bucky’s friend. There was a trust between them. It felt like a violation to think of Bucky at a time like now, to let the memory of Bucky sit inside him and pool there, make him feel hot. It would have been a secret to touch himself and think of Bruno Peretti, safe but awkward to think of Hazel Dreyer, but with Bucky in mind? It felt like a betrayal, like a spot of unhealthiness. Like being a bad friend.

He was glad the water was growing cold. He thought of things to make himself calm down: sewage, and the dead rats in the alley, and _Dear Mr. Rogers, The Selective Service Board thanks you for your inquiries as of November 1st, 1940; and January 3rd, March 5th, May 16th, July 5th, and September 23rd , 1941. We regret to inform you that, having reviewed your medical records and the records of the Fort Hamilton Recruitment Center, you are classed IV-F, unfit for military service due to physical defect._

That did the trick.

He rinsed and toweled off, pulled on his underwear and undershirt, and went back to his room. He considered what Bucky had said, but it seemed to him that he had everything he needed for himself. He would have liked to get the paper delivered, maybe. And—

Oh. He _did_ want to get something. Not anything he needed, though. Probably that meant it wasn’t worth getting. He’d had a good few months, but that was no indication he’d continue to get work, and spending all his cash frivolously wasn’t right. But still. Still. Last time he’d been to Abraham  & Straus, he’d stared for a while at a small 32-volt radio. If he had one of those, he wouldn’t have to go down the street to the lunchroom and listen to Mr. Quan’s.

Steve listened to the radio a lot. Ma was gone. There was no one to talk to at the boarding house, just sailors and toughs like Bruno and Charley, and they treated him like he was a sort of curiosity, the little guy from down the hall who always had a pencil in hand, who often got his hackles up over nothing. A little strange, flipping the dials a little too fast, looking for broadcasts on the front when everyone else wanted to listen to _Hollywood Playhouse_. His own radio? That might make everyone happier.

Though, again, he didn’t need it. It would cost money he might be better off saving. And he wasn’t dependent on the radio. He worked, he pored over the papers, he met up with Arnie Roth and Joe Smith from down the street, he went to the library – Bucky sometimes put on a big act, bossing Steve around, sending him to the tub, acting like Steve never had fun, but that wasn’t true. Steve enjoyed himself sometimes. He had a book he was enjoying for the third or fourth time: _Lost Horizon_ , all about a veteran, an exhausted product of the Great War, who journeyed to this valley. Shangri-La, the book called it.

Steve wasn’t a veteran, and he always tried to be more determined than especially exhausted, and the war hadn’t started and didn’t want him anyway. But going to Shangri-La a few times a week, if only in his mind, was kind of nice.

He did have fun. He did good work. He read. He had — well. Bucky himself was fun, wasn’t he? Even if Steve didn’t admit it to himself, the trick Bucky had – the indefinable urgency he inspired – was to step in with his hair neat, eyes bright, suit immaculate, laughter hidden inside him, all smelling of brylcreem, brought in on the winter breeze, like Shangri-La had come to the boarding house.

Though. This was not a thing Bucky _owed_ him. Steve couldn’t expect it to continue indefinitely. There would be a war. There might be a woman in Bucky’s life. Bucky might be called away to work in the automotive industry, cooling away in a cold little room somewhere. When Steve was left alone – inevitable, he thought, not that he was counting down to it or anything— a radio might make the adjustment a little better.

A hand tapped the transom again. Bucky.

“Figure out what you’re getting me?” Bucky said, poking his head in once Steve had unlocked the door. He was flushed, like he’d run to Dekalb and back. Handsome.

“I can’t get you what you need, Buck,” Steve said. He drank him in for a second, and felt sick with it, like a traitor. So he turned back to his wardrobe to pull out a shirt. “They don’t sell brains at the store.”

“Sure they do,” Bucky said, grinning. “Two-for-one sale. I’ll give ‘em both to you. This is the season to help the needy. Now come on. Get your coat on.”

Steve did. They walked down to Fulton Street in the sun, and when they got there Bucky admired the window. Steve had seen it a million times, and it was nothing special to him, snowflakes and spinning tops and candy canes, stuff he could sell. They went in. Bucky had a shopping list a mile long, beginning with perfume for his sisters and mother. He caught sight of the counter girl – very beautiful, with black curls and black eyes and a natural pink flush to her cheeks that suggested she’d been painted to precise specifications by a machine or by someone in an assembly line somewhere. She seemed vaguely familiar. Bucky said, “Don’t you know her, Steve?”

It was, of all people, Millie Espinosa. Steve did know her. He remembered her trying to sneak him a half-pound of flounder because she’d felt sorry for him, when he was nine and she was twelve. She was working at Abraham & Straus now. Steve still bought fish from her uncle, who’d mentioned that she had a new job selling Shalimar, a far cry from the reek of the fish market, like her life was the American dream told in smells.

“Yeah, that’s Millie,” Steve said thoughtfully. “Millie’s real nice. Haven’t seen her in a while, but she used to ask after Ma all the time, you know.”

But then, when Steve went up to say hello, Millie said, “I’m sorry. Who are you?”

Steve was mortified. He thought she was talking to him. It made sense. They hadn’t really spoken since she’d left high school. And she probably remembered him very young: shirttails and suspenders, bent under the weight of an oily parcel of fish. Here he was in a clean newish coat and a clean shirt and a decent tie. She’d usually found him small and frail, wheezing along the waterfront and under the bridge. Here he was in fairly good health, now officially over five feet. Probably his best appearance to date, in his entire life, no matter what Bucky had said earlier. He hadn’t even been in any fights lately, so he didn’t have a single black eye.

“It’s me,” he said, “Steve Rogers.”

“Yes,” Millie said slowly. “I know, Steve. We live on the same street. We have for twenty years. I was talking to him.”

Steve flushed. Bucky did not. This was normal, had been normal ever since they hit puberty: people overlooking Steve. Women overlooking Steve. It made sense. There Bucky was, Shangri La in a person, and Steve at his best couldn’t compete with that.

“I was gonna get a radio,” Steve said, after about ten minutes. It was the first thing he’d said in ten minutes. Bucky and Millie had been getting to know each other. He’d been stuck under Bucky’s shoulder.

(It had been a great ten minutes, Bucky thought. Natural, normal, comforting, Steve not going anywhere.)

“I’ll go with you in a bit,” Bucky said, patting Steve’s skinny arm underneath him.

“No,” Steve said. “It’s alright. You two are—“ he glanced from Bucky to Millie and back. “Well. I’ll just go. It won’t take that long.”

“Yes, and you said you wanted perfume,” Millie put in. “For your girl?”

“No,” Bucky said. “For my—“

Steve slid out from under Bucky’s shoulder. He made for the elevators.

“Steve!” Bucky called out. Steve turned around and made a face at him. He was going to the elevators. He wasn’t vanishing into thin air or anything.

Steve said again, “Listen, I’m gonna go look at some radios. You—you stay here, Buck. With Millie.”

And Bucky — solid, wonderful Buck — just said, “Would you look at that one. Real decisive. That’s Steve. It’s never a dull minute with him.”

Bucky made noise about Steve’s flaws in private, whenever he felt that it was necessary. But never with other people. 

“I can’t imagine there would be a dull minute,” Steve heard Millie say. “He’s so intense. Funny guy, really. My uncle just loves him. He’s sensible, serious. All about the war. If you ask me, though, people who focus so much on all this unhappiness are missing the really important things in life.”

And then after that Steve was too far away to hear Bucky’s response. But it didn’t matter; he could predict it. Bucky would that say Steve was fine. But he’d decide Steve was miserable. He always seemed to decide that. He was wrong. How could Steve be miserable? He wasn’t being killed, or made to wear a yellow star. He had a job, and money in his pocket. He had Bucky. For now. So he wasn’t unhappy.

He just wasn’t happy either, exactly.

He just was. It didn’t occur to him to worry much about happiness. His ma used to say that some people were wired to worry about delight; if they weren’t always joyful, they felt as though some internal spring had come uncoiled. But he wasn’t like this. If someone – Bucky, or Arnie Roth, or Hazel Dreyer, or anyone else he knew – were to come up and ask him, “How are you?”

He wouldn’t say, “Happy,” or even, “Fine,” or even, “Not so good,” and definitely nothing like, “Lonely,” or “unfit.” He’d just say, “Me? Just waiting for the elevators.”

He was waiting for the elevators. The elevators were intricate metal cages set into marble walls, offset by marble floors and glass lamps and polished dark wood ceilings. They made Steve feel self-conscious, even though he was looking pretty good, with his new shoes and his new coat. Probablyunderdressed for the elevators, though. The elevators were a kind of Shangri-La.

Frank Capra had made a film about it. The book: Lost Horizon, that was. Steve and Bucky had been to see it at the Paramount. The Himalayan princess who lived in Shangri-La was not, as Steve had always imaged, Mr. Vedano’s brown and beautiful wife, interesting and kind-eyed, who’d finally moved to Jersey like she’d always wanted. The princess wasn’t in it at all. She was supplanted by Jane Wyatt, beautiful but hardly any more Himalayan than Mrs. Vedano, But that wasn’t the biggest disappointment. In the film, Shangri-La was a network of clean white art deco palaces. It was mountains, natural wonders.

Steve had never been able to see Shangri-La this way, not even when the book told him to. His Shangri-La wasn’t a harmonious and natural place. It was Bucky, it was Ma, it was the elevator hall at Abraham & Straus. Something he only got to have after working very hard, after sleepless nights sketching, exhausted, a little sick, desperate to pay for his room, determined to put money aside to buy the papers and keep abreast of the war overseas, determined to stand on his own.

He hadn’t been to war yet. His battles were small, ordinary. So how could he be unhappy — with troubles as minor and pathetic as his? No. He wasn’t, just now, very unhappy, though at some point he might be unhappier – for example, if the Service Board never came around. But if he had a radio he’d maybe be – well— not happy. But a person with a radio. That seemed somehow better than a person without a radio.

He told the elevator operator his floor. The elevator progressed upwards slowly, stopping at points, letting off men with parcels, taking in women with small children and girls checking their compacts. Steve stepped out near the top of the building, into a white hall full of radios, gleaming or chrome-plated or covered in shining wood. He walked quickly past the large consoles, giant Philcos and Westinghouses and GE models with rounded corners, glossy dials. One – an 8-tube Zenith model – cost almost a hundred dollars, and he felt poorer just walking by it. He wanted the the tabletop kind, small and light, maybe five tubes. He found them in the corner. Rounded Philips models that looked like miniature church fronts, rectangular Neutrodynes like small wooden coffins, Emersons with removable covers, and Howard Stark designs with tone controls and elliptical speakers.

Steve thought that for thirty dollars, those speakers had better be elliptical. Though he wasn’t quite sure what elliptical meant in this context.

Then, tucked on a display shelf near the wall, he found the Barnes family radio.

It was _the_ Barnes family radio. The one they played all spring and into the summer, bringing news of the Dodgers’ opening games right into Mrs. Barnes’s kitchen. The one that had brought them Artie Shaw and Jack Teagarden, that time Mrs. Barnes had tried and failed to teach Steve to dance. Dotty and Bobby and Becky had watched and hooted from behind the couch, as Bucky harangued them for it and then berated Steve in turn for his lack of rhythm.

It was a green radio. Marbelized and rounded. An Emerson AU 1-90, with the company name printed in flowing gold at the top. Three dials. The same radio.

It was on all through December, whenever Bucky dragged Steve over and dropped him on the couch, fearing that otherwise Steve would have no Christmas to speak of, as though December 25th didn’t hit the boarding house same as everywhere else. Bucky’s pop always cornered Steve for a man’s talk on topics like The Mayor: would he ever learn what to do with this great city? and Young People: how did they operate, exactly? and Telephones: weren’t Becky and Bucky slowly destroying their ability to communicate and sympathize with others every time they wasted money on phone calls instead of sending sensible telegrams? Bucky would stand just behind his father and make faces, fiddle with the dials, try to keep Steve from taking Mr. Barnes too seriously. There was never any danger of that, though.

This was the radio. This was the one.

“Oh, that’s the 1937 model,” said the salesman, behind him. “You don’t want that one.”

“No. I do,“ Steve said. He didn’t know what happy was, and actually it was a waste of time to consider it, but, still: happy was the radio. A little bit. The radio was Bucky, and the Barnes family, and Christmases. It was Shangri-La.

“No,” persisted the salesman. “The 1942, that’s the one you want. The tubes on it! And these dials! The 1942. That’s your radio.”

Steve said, “It’s only 1941.”

“Yeah,” said the salesman, “But the 1941 models are no good. Trust me. You want the 1942. Look to the future with your radio model, I always say.”

“Well, call me when you’ve got the 1999, then,” Steve said. “’Til then I’ll take the ‘37.”

The salesman scowled. But he sold Steve the Barnes family radio, the out of date radio, and for a second Steve was —

No. Not happy. It hit him in the elevator in the way down. For an out-of-date radio, they still charged fifteen dollars. It was robbery. Steve almost wanted to return it, but after making a fuss he felt he had to take the hit and keep going. He rode the elevators downwards feeling impossibly guilty – more than double his rent gone, just like that!

But in a bag he carried the green radio. His.

His now that he’d run through a chunk of his savings, anyway. Feeling very reckless and a little bit horrible, he stumbled into Bucky, waiting down in the elevator hall.

“Hope you got me something nice,” Bucky said. “I got something for you.”

Steve promptly felt even worse. He wondered if he _should_ return the radio. What had he been thinking? Fifteen dollars on a radio. He hadn’t been thinking. He’d just let everything inside him overpower him in that moment. He didn’t need a radio. But there were so many parts of his life that didn’t quite fit right, little jolts of unhappiness injected into him like poisons – the war, the Service Board, Ma gone, thinking urgently of Bucky in his navy slacks, staring at beautiful Millie Espinosa from under Bucky’s shoulder – all this made him feel right down to his bones how unfit he was. And then, like a fool, he’d thought he could cure that by walking into Abraham  & Straus and buying a radio.

That wasn’t how life worked. There was no cure for his life. He just had to try and think his way through it even if he was a little traitorous and unhealthy, severely defective. He had to keep moving forward, to keep fighting.

“Look,” Bucky said. He had a paper in his hands, black and white with bold, industrial lettering. It said, **ROSSUM’S UNIVERSAL ROBOTS**. “That counter girl’s starring in this. Tonight. At the Pitkin.”

Steve looked at it briefly, and couldn’t find the name ‘Mildred Espinosa’ anywhere. Bucky tapped at the bottom of the paper. It said ‘Carol De Vere’ instead.

“That’s her,” Bucky said.

“It’s really not,” Steve said offhandedly. He was still upset with himself for wasting money, but he spared a thought for the fact that if Millie wanted to get off on a glamorous foot with her new guy (because of course Bucky was her new guy, and she was Bucky’s new girl. This was natural, normal, if not very comforting), then that was no business of his. But if she and Bucky hit it off, and then Bucky started discussing his relationship with a ‘Carol de Vere,’ Steve was probably going to have no idea who he was talking about.

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Steve, a name’s just a name. It gets changed, what’s it matter? And you’re missing the point.”

“The point?” Steve said.

“The point,” Bucky said loudly, putting his arms on Steve’s and drawing him right in, like he thought that by doing this Steve had to listen, “Is that this girl expects you there tonight, Steve. At her show.”

Steve blinked at him. He shrugged. He wasn’t really listening. He clutched the bag with the radio in it and felt sick.

Why had he bought it? What spell had the radio cast? It had seemed to promise something. But now he couldn’t remember what.

**Author's Note:**

> I am putting this up to flag for myself that it's over and done with; I don't love it, and there are actually a few characterization choices that I am not fond of now (months after I started writing it). I am not sure I would recommend _Lost Horizon_ to anyone and still don't really know how it became a prominent theme here. I would like to advocate for more low-key pining in boarding houses. I find that hits the spot for me for some reason.


End file.
